The Great Greek Illusion

By ROGER COHEN
NYT

LONDON — Greece has long held emotional sway over Europe. All the cradle-of-Western-civilization talk earned it leniency, even indulgence. The European Union was not ready to go mano-a-mano with the birthplace of democracy.

Past glory is a wonderful thing — and a lousy guide for present policy. That’s true in the Holy Land, in Kosovo and in Athens. Greece should not have been allowed into the euro. It failed to join in 1999 because it did not meet fiscal criteria. When it did meet them in 2001, the fix came through phony budget numbers.

But Europe’s bold monetary union required an Athenian imprimatur to be fully European. So everyone turned a blind eye.

In fact, recent history would have been a much better guide. Greece has had an awful past century. Let’s begin with the wars of 1912-13 that wrested northern Greece from Ottoman control. Then came the massive population exchange, or “ethnic cleansing,” negotiated at Lausanne in 1923 under which about 400,000 Muslims were forced to move from Greece to Turkey and at least 1.2 million Greek Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece.

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